I can patent a method of using IRC to arrange the delivery of baked goods and that would be a valid patent (actually, it's probably already patented).
No idea whether it would be valid legally because the patent office is out with the fairies but it shouldn't be valid. That's just a particular instance of the use of IRC which is a general purpose communication medium. Because it is a general purpose communication medium no patent for a specific instance of that communication should be possible. An "instance of" relation not a "use of" relation. An "instance of" relation should never be patentable because there is always prior art.
The patent office, and you to some degree, seem to be confused about the difference between words and ideas (is a file system a database?), whether ideas are the same and different (are two shades of the color orange the same or different?) and whether one idea is contained by another (is using a car to move something different from using a vehicle to move something?). The patent office doesn't seem to understand even simple concepts like Venn diagrams and the fact that words and meanings have varying overlaps and relationships. Specifically, patenting something simply because somebody has renamed and reduced the coverage of an existing concept should not be possible.
---
Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
Yeah. the twitter angle was pretty much gratuitous.
It's probably twitter marketing parasites. Any "news" item that even remotely mentions twitter gets spammed everywhere.
Most people seriously underestimate just how much astroturfers = stealth/undercover marketers = shills = low lifes have invaded social networking sites and the net in general. They talk the talk of ethics but they rarely walk the walk. Twitter is currently one of the worst.
Anytime you see a one-sided "story" talking about some commercial product, or have trouble trying to have a legitimate discussion with a commercial product zealot (there are very few consumers who are zealots about any commercial product), you're probably dealing with an astroturfer. They are lying shits, make their life hell.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
over time webpages in general tend to load slower.
Not just load slower but read slower. Advertising has a very real cognitive cost associated with them that advertisers like to pretend doesn't exist. And that cost is now getting ridiculous.
The only complaint that I've had is certain programs (including OS configuration menus) use more screen height real-estate than is available and so it's impossible to click an "Ok" button positioned at the bottom of the screen. Though... this has never happened for anything important so I remain satisfied with the product line.
In Gnome select System/Preferences/Appearance/Visual Effects/None. Do an Alt-right-mouse-click anywhere in a dialog window. This should bring up the title bar menu as a popup menu. Select "Move". This allows you to move the window top off the top of the screen so you can see the bottom of it including the buttons. Sometimes refuses to move up but just try again. Makes small screens much more usable.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Yeah, if only open-source was closed-source everything would be okay. Not.
Closed source, binary drivers allows the manufacturers to engage in a multitude of sins. No thanks. The whole point of open source is to make sure as much as possible that everything is open and above board.
It *is* the fault of the kernel
No actually, it isn't. The kernel developers have already offered free driver development and support for any manufacturer that wants it. Not to mention turning a blind eye license-wise to several binary blobs. Your "pure" rant just shows you're a zealot.
In any case the vast majority of devices are already supported. If you include older hardware a lot more is supported in recent versions of linux than in recent versions of windows. As one data point I work with a dozen completely different linux boxes including desktops, laptops and servers, and a variety of peripheral devices. The only hardware that doesn't work fully out-of-the-box with the latest Ubuntu is a HP laptop fingerprint reader which I can use as a "camera" but can't be used to authorize login as in Vista. I'd like that functionality but it's not a big loss and a third party could code it if they cared enough.
Binaries support might be useful for encouraging a few neurotic manufacturers that are worried about giving out source to do something but frankly if they're that neurotic the quality of their offerings is likely to be poor and of little value anyway. It's been my consistent experience that institutional paranoia about "our valuable intellectual property" is inversely proportional to the actual worth of it. It seems that people insecure about their code have reason to be.
Things like market research into what your potential users actually want, high-level UI design, usability studies, deliberate architecting, and a significant test infrastructure are practically *required* in commercial software design, but I don't know if they get the same emphasis in FOSS.
I see little evidence that these improve the quality of the vast majority of commercial software. Make the software pretty and bullet point sell-able, sure. Functional and effective? Not even close.
As just one example among many so-called user-unfriendly text configuration files have been around for a long time because they work and work well. Despite the chorus of complaints from GUI zealots who claim that text files are the devil's spawn and not something they themselves use every time they write a shopping list or note. Text configuration files can be easily script generated from templates, backed up, copied to other machines, commented, re-ordered, diff'ed with other configuration files, linearly scanned for problems etc. Compare that to 99.9% of "user-friendly" configuration GUI's which can do none of these very useful functions. Not to mention the fact that GUI designer frequently stuff up their GUI design in ways which mean a lot of unnecessarily repetitive re-entry of configuration values is needed to get a functional system and the GUI often doesn't reflect the full underlying configuration capabilities needed or available. Oh, and having a GUI to create such a configuration file? A good idea but only if the GUI preserves the layout and comments in the configuration file. Which almost none do. Not to mention not being forwards and backwards compatible with software version changes in the configuration file.
I hear this bullshit often, and thats what it is, bullshit.
You're the bullshitter. Get out into the real world. There are billions of people, thousands of languages, thousands of accounting standards. Many are not supported by windows, many are in the third world where the price of windows is a deal breaker, many are conforming to standards you've never heard of, many want software they control, many detest DRM and all it stands for, and many are thinking long term and not the short-term, blinkered thinking you're professing.
M$ marketing and people sucked in by their propaganda like to claim Windows is the only possible alternative however it's just a dishonest attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophesy.
In reality windows is only one of a number of alternatives, nothing lasts forever, and one size does not fit all.
---
I never look at alternatives because I'm going to be running the same OS for the rest of eternity.
So, in other words, no, you didn't read the patent. Hint: only 12 of the 35 claimed inventions are software.
General purpose computers don't mystically turn software into hardware and you're being dishonest trying to pretend otherwise.
In addition this patent is laughable because, as usual, patent office employees are completely confused about the difference between words and ideas. e.g. A user environment or context is simply one instance of a collection of data and any software that manipulates a collection of data in a similar way should be prior art, Plus almost certainly obvious to somebody in the field because user and software specific contexts far more sophisticated that this have been used since the beginning of computing, even assuming software contexts are an identifiably unique category of software rather than just one of many ways to usefully abstract a piece of software.
---
The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
covers only the "non-functional" elements of the design.
Since the visual design of a web site is functional, in this case a minimalist visual design makes it easier to use amongst other things, and there are a millions of businesses and individuals who want easy to use web pages, it would appear that, assuming the patent system were reasonable this design patent shouldn't even be possible unless it included the trademark "google" to make it non-functional and identifiably unique.
Surprise, surprise, it doesn't include the trademark. One more example of the patent system in action.
To put it another way a web page is the language a computer operator uses to communicate with the computer user. But we don't patent language now do we?
---
The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
Theres a good number of people with incurable diseases and cancers hoping and praying that the drug companies find effective treatments before they die. When you look at it that way a 2.5 % chance of some negative effect occurring isn't worth pushing a drug company to bankruptcy or delaying bringing new treatments to market.
Yes it is. These drug companies are providing you with false hope. Those numbers you are quoting are very likely marketing numbers that have little connection with reality. The company provided those numbers, not some objective third party. The negative studies will have been discarded, the data outliers quietly dropped, the bad results simply ignored and soft measures like "quality of life" spun like crazy.
Doctors love to claim the marketing doesn't affect them however the drug companies wouldn't do it if it didn't work. You do know that drug companies spend far more on marketing than research, don't you? Of course, they try to hide those numbers with doctor "education" (really, incredibly biased marketing material) being fraudulently considered as development.
In fact, I can't even be sure you're not a drug company marketer fraudulently pretending to be an objective third party. If you are, ever thought of getting a real job, you know, one where you contribute to the community instead of being a parasite?
Many drug companies are little better than the snake oil peddlers of days past with shiny white lab coats and a marketing department. If you can't see that then you are deluded. I've lost count of the number of drugs in long term use that have turned out to be insanely expensive placebos and some even actively harmful.
There needs to be full accountability with people going to jail for any fraud at all and the companies of those people shut down.
What you really want, a dangerous drugs program for those seriously ill, should be allowed but only with serious controls that give absolutely total transparency so that patients and their doctors can make fully informed decisions. And that means at a minimum objective, third party testing of the drugs, not drug company testing.
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An unobtrusive ad is a non-functional ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
1) The availability of the good or service itself, and
No, it doesn't. How many Cola cola ad's have you seen? Consumers find out what's available locally when they go out to purchase.
2) By spending lots of money on advertising, the validity of the company in question is verified to the end user.
No, it doesn't. Plenty of fly-by-nighters advertise big. All it validates is that somebody has a lot of money. This is not the same as being a worthwhile company.
advertising is a begrudged necessity.
No it isn't. Solicited, classified advertising, including "surprise me" categories, is worthwhile.
Unsolicited, unclassified, mass market advertising, particularly in saturated markets, is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the marketing parasites (= arms dealers). A relatively small number of marketing lowlifes are stealing the lives of huge numbers of people. And the time of our life is the most important thing we have.
Marketers love to conflate solicited, classified advertising and unsolicited, unclassified advertising. Telemarketers particularly. They are not even remotely the same. Capitalism would function quite well with no unsolicited mass market advertising at all. Marketers would hate it of course but that's a bonus.
---
Don't waste your life on marketing drivel/nonsense
I can't help but wonder where did all of the douchebags come from.
It's simple statistics. In any large group of people, and on the internet we're talking billions, even if most people are wonderful it is a statistical certainty that a small fraction will be douchebags. Those douchebags have visibility out of all proportion to their numbers. e.g. The 4 people who were responsible for 3 billion robocalls.
In addition, in the real world it's usually obvious when you're dealing with an possibly unsocialized child. On the net, not so much.
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The USA is <5% of the world's population. It is statistically insignificant.
I honestly don't believe that any contributor posts with a neutral point of view actually.
A NPOV is the author trying to present information in the best interests of the typical reader. The author is human, has incomplete information and so cannot be completely unbiased but nonetheless they make a best effort.
That a person gets paid, just makes their biases more obvious.
A non-NPOV is the author trying to present information in the best interests of the writer. They are trying to manipulate the reader into making irrational judgments based on incomplete and biased information in favour of the writer, not the reader. The author is not making a best effort for the reader at all.
I know which I'd prefer.
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An unobtrusive ad is a non-functional ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
(and for those who think this is a good thing, the result of this line is there's no such thing as an invention, because everybody builds on what's already there).
Your bias is showing. An "invention" is completely different thing from a "patent". People like you who assume they are the same are part of the problem.
In addition your claim that obvious software patents are not being awarded is nonsense. Do a patent search for the word "software". Look at the patent numbers. Almost all recently released patents have the word software in them (look at the patent numbers), most of them are software only patents, virtually all of them are obvious to somebody in the field and almost none of them required any significant research investment to be protected (the entire rational of the patent system).
---
The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
If it were ordinary, surely there would be dozens!
One more example of the faulty logic of patent boosters. Confuses ordinary with obvious and completely ignores the fact there are a virtually infinite number of reasons why things are not done. Non-obvious is only one possibility among many. In this case it's likely that nobody's bothered - web forms often don't even bother filtering spaces let alone anything more complicated.
---
The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
The problem with your reasoning is that when a free-market entity produces an inferior product, service, or solution, it will eventually fail.
No it won't. If it has the means to compete negatively, by bringing the competition down, rather than positively, by bringing it's own product up, it can easily last indefinitely.
You are implicitly pushing the myth of the "pure free market". That's simply warlordism, might makes right. All functioning, good markets need law, both written and unwritten, to stop all the negative ways that people can compete (e.g. deceptive advertising, monopoly rents, incomplete information, excessive transaction costs, externalities etc.), while still allowing the positive ways that people can compete (e.g. improving product, reducing prices etc.).
Or to put it another way for some things one person, one vote, works better than one dollar, one vote. Both are accountable despite what you claim. And you think tyranny of the majority sucks? Perhaps so but it's better than the only alternative, tyranny of a minority.
What's wrong with a wiki? A newspaper is simply a general tool for publishing text and images. A wiki is the same except you could publish faster, cheaper and more voluminously.
As a bonus you could use a wiki with access and revision control.
You have no reason to use a specialized application or do a "big bang" change. In fact lots of reasons not to.
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Astroturfers and sock puppets are liars and companies have no right of anonymity. Please have the common decency to put the company you're representing in your sig and stop rationalizing deceit.
You know, "-1 Flamebait" is no substitute for "-1 Disagree and wish to censor". I don't agree with bonch either, but his post is certainly no flamebait.
Not clear. He endlessly spams the same propaganda, completely ignores responses (I have never seen him once acknowledge that any alternative point of view might be valid), and is in general just a mouthpiece. Just because it's worded nicely doesn't mean that it's not flamebait.
Very likely he's a sock puppet or astroturfer. The RIAA is spending many millions on anti-piracy propaganda and has the ethics of alley cats, you think they're not going to spend some of it on spamming social networking sites to drown out alternative points of view?
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
I'm really tired of the overuse, especially in the news media, of the words "could" and "might".
Agreed but you're failing to recognize that this isn't news, it's marketing.
Almost all "news" items about products are written by marketers these days. They will abuse the English language as much as they think they can legally get away with. This particular "news" item appears to be a puff piece to drum up some interest in the G1 google phone.
The entire pocketgamer.co.uk web site appears to be marketing. Almost all the articles on it are puff pieces with no objective reporting at all.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
I'd say that for a system that has all sorts of flaws and issues, this is a legitimate case where the system is working as it was intended in a legitimate fashion.
You probably have zero evidence that the patent did in fact "promote the arts" and more particularly that the tech would not have happened without the patent.
There really is some messed up logic in the patent world. Circular reasoning, hand waving, rationalization of all kinds, complete denial of independent reinvention, you name it. The ethical and logical basis for patents is just awful.
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Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
The only difference is that this is an "operating system" not an "application."
Both are software. Both are programs. Both take inputs and give outputs.
Apparently, that's enough of a distinction for the USPTO to award a patent.
The USPTO bureaucracy empire building by making smaller and smaller and almost completely arbitrary distinctions to say an idea is the same or different. And as usual they are completely confused about the difference between words and ideas.
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Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
I agree in general however I was thinking of a "light touch" modification that is maybe a mainstream install with a small Dell software package that has an introductory web page and support info specific to Dell customers and not much else.
Dell isn't in the software creation business and there's little reason for it to do anything more but it does rebrand everything it sells and the only reason they're not selling Dell windows is because M$ won't let them.
Slashdot Mirror
I can patent a method of using IRC to arrange the delivery of baked goods and that would be a valid patent (actually, it's probably already patented).
No idea whether it would be valid legally because the patent office is out with the fairies but it shouldn't be valid. That's just a particular instance of the use of IRC which is a general purpose communication medium. Because it is a general purpose communication medium no patent for a specific instance of that communication should be possible. An "instance of" relation not a "use of" relation. An "instance of" relation should never be patentable because there is always prior art.
The patent office, and you to some degree, seem to be confused about the difference between words and ideas (is a file system a database?), whether ideas are the same and different (are two shades of the color orange the same or different?) and whether one idea is contained by another (is using a car to move something different from using a vehicle to move something?). The patent office doesn't seem to understand even simple concepts like Venn diagrams and the fact that words and meanings have varying overlaps and relationships. Specifically, patenting something simply because somebody has renamed and reduced the coverage of an existing concept should not be possible.
---
Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
Yeah. the twitter angle was pretty much gratuitous.
It's probably twitter marketing parasites. Any "news" item that even remotely mentions twitter gets spammed everywhere.
Most people seriously underestimate just how much astroturfers = stealth/undercover marketers = shills = low lifes have invaded social networking sites and the net in general. They talk the talk of ethics but they rarely walk the walk. Twitter is currently one of the worst.
Anytime you see a one-sided "story" talking about some commercial product, or have trouble trying to have a legitimate discussion with a commercial product zealot (there are very few consumers who are zealots about any commercial product), you're probably dealing with an astroturfer. They are lying shits, make their life hell.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
over time webpages in general tend to load slower.
Not just load slower but read slower. Advertising has a very real cognitive cost associated with them that advertisers like to pretend doesn't exist. And that cost is now getting ridiculous.
---
Ad's devalue other ad's.
The only complaint that I've had is certain programs (including OS configuration menus) use more screen height real-estate than is available and so it's impossible to click an "Ok" button positioned at the bottom of the screen. Though... this has never happened for anything important so I remain satisfied with the product line.
In Gnome select System/Preferences/Appearance/Visual Effects/None. Do an Alt-right-mouse-click anywhere in a dialog window. This should bring up the title bar menu as a popup menu. Select "Move". This allows you to move the window top off the top of the screen so you can see the bottom of it including the buttons. Sometimes refuses to move up but just try again. Makes small screens much more usable.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Yeah, if only open-source was closed-source everything would be okay. Not.
Closed source, binary drivers allows the manufacturers to engage in a multitude of sins. No thanks. The whole point of open source is to make sure as much as possible that everything is open and above board.
It *is* the fault of the kernel
No actually, it isn't. The kernel developers have already offered free driver development and support for any manufacturer that wants it. Not to mention turning a blind eye license-wise to several binary blobs. Your "pure" rant just shows you're a zealot.
In any case the vast majority of devices are already supported. If you include older hardware a lot more is supported in recent versions of linux than in recent versions of windows. As one data point I work with a dozen completely different linux boxes including desktops, laptops and servers, and a variety of peripheral devices. The only hardware that doesn't work fully out-of-the-box with the latest Ubuntu is a HP laptop fingerprint reader which I can use as a "camera" but can't be used to authorize login as in Vista. I'd like that functionality but it's not a big loss and a third party could code it if they cared enough.
Binaries support might be useful for encouraging a few neurotic manufacturers that are worried about giving out source to do something but frankly if they're that neurotic the quality of their offerings is likely to be poor and of little value anyway. It's been my consistent experience that institutional paranoia about "our valuable intellectual property" is inversely proportional to the actual worth of it. It seems that people insecure about their code have reason to be.
---
Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
Things like market research into what your potential users actually want, high-level UI design, usability studies, deliberate architecting, and a significant test infrastructure are practically *required* in commercial software design, but I don't know if they get the same emphasis in FOSS.
I see little evidence that these improve the quality of the vast majority of commercial software. Make the software pretty and bullet point sell-able, sure. Functional and effective? Not even close.
As just one example among many so-called user-unfriendly text configuration files have been around for a long time because they work and work well. Despite the chorus of complaints from GUI zealots who claim that text files are the devil's spawn and not something they themselves use every time they write a shopping list or note. Text configuration files can be easily script generated from templates, backed up, copied to other machines, commented, re-ordered, diff'ed with other configuration files, linearly scanned for problems etc. Compare that to 99.9% of "user-friendly" configuration GUI's which can do none of these very useful functions. Not to mention the fact that GUI designer frequently stuff up their GUI design in ways which mean a lot of unnecessarily repetitive re-entry of configuration values is needed to get a functional system and the GUI often doesn't reflect the full underlying configuration capabilities needed or available. Oh, and having a GUI to create such a configuration file? A good idea but only if the GUI preserves the layout and comments in the configuration file. Which almost none do. Not to mention not being forwards and backwards compatible with software version changes in the configuration file.
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DRM. You don't control it means you don't own it.
wow, way to ruin a pretty good reply with the m-dollarsign.
Actually, M$ astroturfers seem to hate it which is a pretty good reason to keep using it.
---
DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
Microsoft doesn't need to do that. The open-source community has been doing that just fine by themselves for years now.
It's called a free market, not a monopoly. Both cooperation and competition are common in the open source community.
---
DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
I hear this bullshit often, and thats what it is, bullshit.
You're the bullshitter. Get out into the real world. There are billions of people, thousands of languages, thousands of accounting standards. Many are not supported by windows, many are in the third world where the price of windows is a deal breaker, many are conforming to standards you've never heard of, many want software they control, many detest DRM and all it stands for, and many are thinking long term and not the short-term, blinkered thinking you're professing.
M$ marketing and people sucked in by their propaganda like to claim Windows is the only possible alternative however it's just a dishonest attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophesy.
In reality windows is only one of a number of alternatives, nothing lasts forever, and one size does not fit all.
---
I never look at alternatives because I'm going to be running the same OS for the rest of eternity.
So, in other words, no, you didn't read the patent. Hint: only 12 of the 35 claimed inventions are software.
General purpose computers don't mystically turn software into hardware and you're being dishonest trying to pretend otherwise.
In addition this patent is laughable because, as usual, patent office employees are completely confused about the difference between words and ideas. e.g. A user environment or context is simply one instance of a collection of data and any software that manipulates a collection of data in a similar way should be prior art, Plus almost certainly obvious to somebody in the field because user and software specific contexts far more sophisticated that this have been used since the beginning of computing, even assuming software contexts are an identifiably unique category of software rather than just one of many ways to usefully abstract a piece of software.
---
The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
covers only the "non-functional" elements of the design.
Since the visual design of a web site is functional, in this case a minimalist visual design makes it easier to use amongst other things, and there are a millions of businesses and individuals who want easy to use web pages, it would appear that, assuming the patent system were reasonable this design patent shouldn't even be possible unless it included the trademark "google" to make it non-functional and identifiably unique.
Surprise, surprise, it doesn't include the trademark. One more example of the patent system in action.
To put it another way a web page is the language a computer operator uses to communicate with the computer user. But we don't patent language now do we?
---
The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
Theres a good number of people with incurable diseases and cancers hoping and praying that the drug companies find effective treatments before they die. When you look at it that way a 2.5 % chance of some negative effect occurring isn't worth pushing a drug company to bankruptcy or delaying bringing new treatments to market.
Yes it is. These drug companies are providing you with false hope. Those numbers you are quoting are very likely marketing numbers that have little connection with reality. The company provided those numbers, not some objective third party. The negative studies will have been discarded, the data outliers quietly dropped, the bad results simply ignored and soft measures like "quality of life" spun like crazy.
Doctors love to claim the marketing doesn't affect them however the drug companies wouldn't do it if it didn't work. You do know that drug companies spend far more on marketing than research, don't you? Of course, they try to hide those numbers with doctor "education" (really, incredibly biased marketing material) being fraudulently considered as development.
In fact, I can't even be sure you're not a drug company marketer fraudulently pretending to be an objective third party. If you are, ever thought of getting a real job, you know, one where you contribute to the community instead of being a parasite?
Many drug companies are little better than the snake oil peddlers of days past with shiny white lab coats and a marketing department. If you can't see that then you are deluded. I've lost count of the number of drugs in long term use that have turned out to be insanely expensive placebos and some even actively harmful.
There needs to be full accountability with people going to jail for any fraud at all and the companies of those people shut down.
What you really want, a dangerous drugs program for those seriously ill, should be allowed but only with serious controls that give absolutely total transparency so that patients and their doctors can make fully informed decisions. And that means at a minimum objective, third party testing of the drugs, not drug company testing.
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An unobtrusive ad is a non-functional ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
1) The availability of the good or service itself, and
No, it doesn't. How many Cola cola ad's have you seen? Consumers find out what's available locally when they go out to purchase.
2) By spending lots of money on advertising, the validity of the company in question is verified to the end user.
No, it doesn't. Plenty of fly-by-nighters advertise big. All it validates is that somebody has a lot of money. This is not the same as being a worthwhile company.
advertising is a begrudged necessity.
No it isn't. Solicited, classified advertising, including "surprise me" categories, is worthwhile.
Unsolicited, unclassified, mass market advertising, particularly in saturated markets, is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the marketing parasites (= arms dealers). A relatively small number of marketing lowlifes are stealing the lives of huge numbers of people. And the time of our life is the most important thing we have.
Marketers love to conflate solicited, classified advertising and unsolicited, unclassified advertising. Telemarketers particularly. They are not even remotely the same. Capitalism would function quite well with no unsolicited mass market advertising at all. Marketers would hate it of course but that's a bonus.
---
Don't waste your life on marketing drivel/nonsense
I can't help but wonder where did all of the douchebags come from.
It's simple statistics. In any large group of people, and on the internet we're talking billions, even if most people are wonderful it is a statistical certainty that a small fraction will be douchebags. Those douchebags have visibility out of all proportion to their numbers. e.g. The 4 people who were responsible for 3 billion robocalls.
In addition, in the real world it's usually obvious when you're dealing with an possibly unsocialized child. On the net, not so much.
---
The USA is <5% of the world's population. It is statistically insignificant.
I honestly don't believe that any contributor posts with a neutral point of view actually.
A NPOV is the author trying to present information in the best interests of the typical reader. The author is human, has incomplete information and so cannot be completely unbiased but nonetheless they make a best effort.
That a person gets paid, just makes their biases more obvious.
A non-NPOV is the author trying to present information in the best interests of the writer. They are trying to manipulate the reader into making irrational judgments based on incomplete and biased information in favour of the writer, not the reader. The author is not making a best effort for the reader at all.
I know which I'd prefer.
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An unobtrusive ad is a non-functional ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
(and for those who think this is a good thing, the result of this line is there's no such thing as an invention, because everybody builds on what's already there).
Your bias is showing. An "invention" is completely different thing from a "patent". People like you who assume they are the same are part of the problem.
In addition your claim that obvious software patents are not being awarded is nonsense. Do a patent search for the word "software". Look at the patent numbers. Almost all recently released patents have the word software in them (look at the patent numbers), most of them are software only patents, virtually all of them are obvious to somebody in the field and almost none of them required any significant research investment to be protected (the entire rational of the patent system).
---
The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
If it were ordinary, surely there would be dozens!
One more example of the faulty logic of patent boosters. Confuses ordinary with obvious and completely ignores the fact there are a virtually infinite number of reasons why things are not done. Non-obvious is only one possibility among many. In this case it's likely that nobody's bothered - web forms often don't even bother filtering spaces let alone anything more complicated.
---
The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
The problem with your reasoning is that when a free-market entity produces an inferior product, service, or solution, it will eventually fail.
No it won't. If it has the means to compete negatively, by bringing the competition down, rather than positively, by bringing it's own product up, it can easily last indefinitely.
You are implicitly pushing the myth of the "pure free market". That's simply warlordism, might makes right. All functioning, good markets need law, both written and unwritten, to stop all the negative ways that people can compete (e.g. deceptive advertising, monopoly rents, incomplete information, excessive transaction costs, externalities etc.), while still allowing the positive ways that people can compete (e.g. improving product, reducing prices etc.).
Or to put it another way for some things one person, one vote, works better than one dollar, one vote. Both are accountable despite what you claim. And you think tyranny of the majority sucks? Perhaps so but it's better than the only alternative, tyranny of a minority.
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You communist! Breathing shared air!
The software tool just does not there.
What's wrong with a wiki? A newspaper is simply a general tool for publishing text and images. A wiki is the same except you could publish faster, cheaper and more voluminously.
As a bonus you could use a wiki with access and revision control.
You have no reason to use a specialized application or do a "big bang" change. In fact lots of reasons not to.
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Astroturfers and sock puppets are liars and companies have no right of anonymity. Please have the common decency to put the company you're representing in your sig and stop rationalizing deceit.
You know, "-1 Flamebait" is no substitute for "-1 Disagree and wish to censor". I don't agree with bonch either, but his post is certainly no flamebait.
Not clear. He endlessly spams the same propaganda, completely ignores responses (I have never seen him once acknowledge that any alternative point of view might be valid), and is in general just a mouthpiece. Just because it's worded nicely doesn't mean that it's not flamebait.
Very likely he's a sock puppet or astroturfer. The RIAA is spending many millions on anti-piracy propaganda and has the ethics of alley cats, you think they're not going to spend some of it on spamming social networking sites to drown out alternative points of view?
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
I'm really tired of the overuse, especially in the news media, of the words "could" and "might".
Agreed but you're failing to recognize that this isn't news, it's marketing.
Almost all "news" items about products are written by marketers these days. They will abuse the English language as much as they think they can legally get away with. This particular "news" item appears to be a puff piece to drum up some interest in the G1 google phone.
The entire pocketgamer.co.uk web site appears to be marketing. Almost all the articles on it are puff pieces with no objective reporting at all.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
I'd say that for a system that has all sorts of flaws and issues, this is a legitimate case where the system is working as it was intended in a legitimate fashion.
You can't know that. The entire purpose of patents is: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
You probably have zero evidence that the patent did in fact "promote the arts" and more particularly that the tech would not have happened without the patent.
There really is some messed up logic in the patent world. Circular reasoning, hand waving, rationalization of all kinds, complete denial of independent reinvention, you name it. The ethical and logical basis for patents is just awful.
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Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
The only difference is that this is an "operating system" not an "application."
Both are software. Both are programs. Both take inputs and give outputs.
Apparently, that's enough of a distinction for the USPTO to award a patent.
The USPTO bureaucracy empire building by making smaller and smaller and almost completely arbitrary distinctions to say an idea is the same or different. And as usual they are completely confused about the difference between words and ideas.
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Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
As long as it's not doing it the same way as someone else, there isn't prior art.
Whether it's the "same" or "different" is little more than USPTO handwaving. Their chutzpah is incredible.
They can't even reasonably say whether two shades of the color orange are the same or different let alone whether two ideas are the same or different.
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Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
Branded Linux is a bad idea.
I agree in general however I was thinking of a "light touch" modification that is maybe a mainstream install with a small Dell software package that has an introductory web page and support info specific to Dell customers and not much else.
Dell isn't in the software creation business and there's little reason for it to do anything more but it does rebrand everything it sells and the only reason they're not selling Dell windows is because M$ won't let them.
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I want a free and open market. Do you?